You’ll be pleased to know that the medium term plans for teaching Benin at KS2 are well advanced and should be on the site early next month. I’ve been working on some cracking ‘killer’ activities which are not only creative but great fun too. One of the killer activities is called curate dilemma. There is [...]

You’ll be pleased to know that the medium term plans for teaching the Maya at KS2 are well advanced and should be on the site early next month. I’ve been working on some cracking ‘killer’ activities which are not only creative but great fun too. One of the killer activities is to help the Guatemalan [...]

Work is now well-advanced on Benin medium term planner. Just clearing copyright on images for the 6 killer activities for the topic. To give you a flavour.Pupils are asked to recreate an illustrated drawing to show what Baghdad might have looked like 1,000 years ago. To help they have scraps of eye-witness accounts ( printed [...]

Great new KS1 topic in production which embrace new new famous people . The first is Caxton , the second Bell (of telephone fame). 4 great killer activities on Caxton include:
slow reveal image for pupils to use increasing number of clues to speculate as to why this man might be famous. They then have [...]

Aside from Ancient Egypt, these are the three best taught history topics in KS2 so it is madness to ditch them in favour of Gove’s untested , unresourced and uneducated choices. The first, an obvious poin,t is to carry on teaching them any way. You won’t go to the Tower. So where does [...]

There are two principal reasons why I think Benin was included as one of only three optional non-Western societies.
The first is the period covered. It is, very roughly, covering the same period of time as the last British history topic pupils will have studied. This invites the question, ‘What was happening elsewhere in the world [...]

A recent OFQUAL report (14 February 2014) confirmed some of our worst fears about the quality of history examination marking. History markers were rated lowest of any subject in terms of accuracy, yes, bottom of all the subjects in the league table.

“In particular, some felt multi-topic subjects, such as psychology, history and sociology, were vulnerable [...]